Cannibal Capers in Colonial Tassie

Van Diemen’s Land is the latest in a long series of painfully earnest, artistically spineless and ultimately pointless Australian films.  It is 1823 and the isolated island colony that eventually became Tasmania is not a hugely fun place to be.  Conceived by the British as a place of permanent banishment for reoffending convicts it is, as the Gaelic-speaking narrator muses, for all intents and purposes ‘the end of the world – a fine prison.’  The speaker is Alexander Pearce (played by co-writer/producer Oscar Redding), a ‘quiet man’ who, along with seven other convicts, escapes the grinding brutality of internment by fleeing into the island’s mountainous wilderness.

Meticulous attention has been paid to establishing an authentic sense of the period; the actors are all scraggily hirsute, sporting clothing stitched together from possum skins with the backs of some riven with scars from old floggings.  Aside from their shared desperation, lust for freedom and longing for women the men have little in common.  They quickly segment along ethnic lines, the English around presumptive leader Robert Greenhill (Arthur Angel), the Irish around Pearce and his friend, the young, hot-blooded Alexander Dalton (Mark Leonard Winter).

Although it is initially difficult to work out who’s who (not helped by the occasional dodgy accent), there are some nice establishing scenes depicting both the tension between these cliques as well as moments of camaraderie.  However as conditions become more unendurable and the provisions run out, these ties prove to be all too easily broken as the groups’ hunger takes a bloody turn.

From here the plot moves with wearing inevitability towards its last-man-standing denouement.  Richard Flanagan, author of arguably the most stunning fictional treatment of the early days of the Tasmanian colony, Gould’s Book of Fish, has commented that the film is ‘spare, compelling and poetic.’  Although the first and last are certainly true, the script being characterised by terse, evocative language, the film can hardly be called compelling.  Violent action gives way to long, long stretches of silence, the filmmakers filling the void with shots that slowly pan across the lush wilderness that succeed only in sapping any dramatic momentum.

The film is unrelenting in its realism, first time director Jonathan auf der Heide depicting Pearce’s descent into cannibalism with unsensationalised detachment.  The problem with this approach is that rather than simply providing the viewer with critical distance, the film begins to seem as though it is avoiding its own subject matter.  This amounts either to a lack of artistic imagination on the filmmakers’ part, or simple squeamishness, unwilling to directly confront the questions raised by the extreme, abject acts that lie at the heart of the story.  Ultimately, Van Diemen’s Land seems to be a victim of its own lofty pretensions, the filmmakers’ timidity allowing it to slide into nihilistic meaninglessness.

Local release 24th September

Things to warm the heart: Fantastic Mr Fox is imminent (hooray!); xkcd is releasing a book (hooray!); despite how it may seem at the time, hangovers DO eventually evaporate.  Thank christ.